Our Benign Dictator expects his Ministers to furnish the Cabinet Secretary with a Note setting out our policy proposals for the incoming Administration.
This afternoon, I took some time to explore the political philosophy underpinning the new government's manifesto with the joint Home Secretary.
Our aim is to create a society where in the words of AJP Taylor a man could:
...pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and how he liked. He had no official number or identity card.
We agreed that it is the first duty of government to recognise - and respect - these freedoms of our citizens. These freedoms are not in our gift. Unlike other governments we do not recognise that we (as a government) possess - or can create - rights that can be bestowed upon the electorate.
As Adam Smith rather more eloquently put it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
[To oblige a man] to perform what in gratitude he ought to perform, and what every impartial spectator would approve him performing, would...be still more improper than his neglecting to perform it.
Our task is, as the American essayist Albert Jay Nock observed, to encourage people to "do the right thing" by recognising the essential freedoms that allow them to regulate their own lives with the minimum direction or interference from government.
Further explanation of this underlying philosophy can be found here.
On the question of law reform, the joint Home Secretary and I agreed that it is the task of government to sustain a system of justice that, in Smith's words, protects the person, estate or reputation of a citizen from injury or encroachment.
On fiscal policy while we defer to the Treasury, our belief is that taxes should be low, simple and compulsory (and flat).
The priority for the new team at the Scotland Office must be to reform the structures of government in North Britain. After some years of devolution we can recognise the strengths and limitations of the current settlement. The First Minister himself recognised last week in an interview that the Scotland Act is not set in stone.
The Scotland Office proposes a Government of Scotland (Reform) Bill to better regulate the governance of Scotland. This Bill builds on the principles of devolution while incorporating best practice from other parts of the UK and elsewhere.
The Scottish Parliament and Executive will be remodelled along the lines of the London Assembly. The First Minister of Scotland will be directly elected and will draw his or her cabinet from outside the Scottish Parliament. The Parliament's role will be to scrutinise the Executive budget (for proposals for further fiscal autonomy see Cabinet Paper #2), and to debate and pass (or reject) measures sent from the Executive.
Local government will be reformed. Scotland's 32 councils will be replaced with city-regions aligned with the newly proposed regional transport partnerships and also sharing boundaries (as far as possible) with the new community health partnerships (for further detail on local government reform see Cabinet Paper #3). Each city-region will be administered by a directly elected (Lord) Provost with a supervisory council.
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